1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer and a printing method and, more particularly, to a printer and a printing method for outputting at least a portion of data received for printing to another external printer.
2. Description of Related Art
In a conventional printer, a print control unit receives input data, produces print data on the basis of the input data, and gives the print data to a print unit. In a copy printing mode, when producing a plurality of printed sheets carrying the same print data by such a printer, the desired number of printed sheets is specified for the printer and the printer prints the print data on one print sheet at a time. In a division printing mode, when the printer receives a print instruction to print the print data on a printing sheet of a sheet size exceeding a possible sheet size limited by the construction of the printer, the print data is divided into a plurality of pieces of data. Then, the plurality of pieces of data are printed on a plurality of printing sheets individually, and the plurality of printed sheets are connected or patched together to obtain a printed sheet of a desired large size. Since the printer needs to print the print data on the plurality of printing sheets in either printing mode, the printer needs additional time to print the print data on a large number of printing sheets. Particularly, when printing posters or the like by a large color plotter or a large color printer, printing on each poster requires much time and reduces productivity remarkably.
A printing method has been proposed to print the print data on a plurality of printing sheets in a relatively short time by using a network of a plurality of printers that operate simultaneously. When carrying out this printing method, a print controller creates a print schedule to assign pages to the plurality of printers and sends corresponding print data to the plurality of printers to operate the plurality of printers simultaneously in a parallel mode for printing.
This previously proposed printing method, however, needs a special print data assigning mechanism to create the print schedule before starting the printing operation. Therefore, input data must first be given to a print control unit provided with the print data assigning mechanism, which is an obstacle to constructing a flexible printing system. Further, since this printing method needs a plurality of printers, an expensive network must be constructed, which is very costly.